Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych reviews an honor guard during his inauguration ceremony Thursday

Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his political rival Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski are together in the Ukrainian capital today for the inauguration of Ukraine’s new president Viktor Yanukovych. That’s a welcome gesture of the Polish authorities after several years of Poland’s blind and unreciprocated love affair with the Orange former president Viktor Yushchenko.

It took several painful kicks from the outgoing president for much of the Polish elite to realize that it unnecessarily put all eggs in the Yushchenko basket years earlier during the Orange Revolution that made him president in 2005.

When white-and-red flags were waved in Kyiv during the street protests against the rigged elections of late 2004 and Polish politicians speaking at rallies on the Maidan were treated like saviors, it almost felt like a honeymoon between Poland and Ukraine. All the conflicts of the past seemed like they were all forgotten — from the centuries of what some Ukrainians see as Polish oppression when much of present-day Ukraine belonged to the Polish Crown to the massacres of ethnic Poles in Volhynia during World War II.

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But after Yushchenko was sworn in and Polish politicians and crowds returned home feeling fully satisfied, it turned out very quickly that the Orange camp, the Ukrainian political scene and in fact the entire Ukrainian nation is divided about where to go — east or west. In the end, the Orange camp disintegrated amid a power struggle, leaving Poland hanging on Yushchenko who in the meantime became deeply unpopular.

Taking Polish support for granted, Yushchenko also started making gestures toward the more nationalist voter base, with Poland finally erupting with outrage when the outgoing president made Stepan Bandera, a key anti-Polish figure, a Hero of Ukraine.

The pickle Poland found itself in with Ukrainian leadership, and also earlier with the Georgian leader, stemmed from Polish politicians’ long-running assumption that if someone’s against Russia, that person is automatically with Poland, or that if someone’s pro-Russian, he or she won’t even want to meet a Polish official.

Now the Polish government says “Poland is always ready to strengthen the strategic dimension of the Polish-Ukrainian relations,” which in plain English means it will talk to someone who’s seen as pro-Russian without assuming he’ll bite.

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